Javascript to Refresh All OBIEE Dashboard Analysis

OBIEE isn’t designed for (near) real time reporting, and as such doesn’t have an out of the box page refresh option.

There are times when I’ve needed a dashboard to be refreshed – when looking at query performance dashboards, for example, and would like the charts and tables to be constantly updated.

After searching on-line I found a few different ways to to refresh a dashboard but they all refreshed the whole page, rather than just the Analysis themselves. It’s not the end of the world, but it results in the whole page flickering as the Browser reloads it. It’s most annoying when you’re half way through the ‘Dashboards’ menu, about to click the navigate away and BAM! The page refreshes and you loose your position on the menu.

The following script is a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript code to loop through each Analysis on a single Dashboard page and issue the OBIEE Refresh command. A small box towards the bottom left hand side of the page that overlays the Dashboard with some controls and stats for the page refresh. It will show when the page was last refreshed, a countdown in seconds to the next refresh and a button to start and stop the automatic refresh.

Works in Chrome 44 and Internet Explorer 8 and 10

There are 3 variables that are user changeable:

vRefreshDuration controls how many seconds between refreshes. Make sure this is higher than how long each query takes, otherwise an Answer will be asked to refresh before it’s finished refreshing!

vMessageLastRefreshed is the message displayed before the date and time of the last refresh.

vMessageNextRefresh is the message displayed before the countdown in seconds to the next refresh.

Feel free to change the below code, but please keep the header information. If you make any improvements, please let me know!

To add the Refresh code to a Dashboard, create a Text Dashboard Object and drag it onto any Dashboard that you’d like to automatically refresh. Then paste the below code into the Text box and check the ‘Contains HTML Markup’ checkbox. Click save and view your Dashboard!